When I was growing up history was something that permeated our house.
There were books and photos, and old records.

There were fossils, models, maps and artifacts.

I
was always interested in military history, because the military and
warfare runs like a horrible bloody thread through the history of
civilization. Didn't matter if it was ancient history, Romans, Greeks,
Persians, Celts, or Mediaeval sieges and battles, or 18th and 19th C
wars, or the great upheavals of the 20th C. I was interested in them
all. There was one thing that I remember very clearly though and that
was the major difference in the way my Father treated the wars of the
20th C compared to those of history.

These wars
were different, they were different because they were still MEMORY not
just HISTORY. My Grandfather fought in the First World War and I had
friends whose parents had fought in the Second.
The Ghosts of these
wars were not ready to be history yet. They were real people still
living, still working, still hugging their loved ones and trying to live
with the MEMORY of chaos and destruction that they had been forced to
live through. They also struggled with the memory of those they had
lost.

British troops negotiate a trench as they go forward
in support of an
attack on the village of Morval
during the Battle of the Somme.
Photograph: PA

As a kid my strongest impression of the
difference between the Wars of History and the Wars of Memory was simply
that History had colour whereas the modern wars of the 20th C were
BLACK and WHITE.

We had photographs of these titanic struggles in all
their gritty horror, you could see the face of war in its terror and its
destruction, but there was no colour. That made them real in some
senses but strangely unreal in others.

The wars
depicted in the history books were often illustrated in colour
paintings, romanticized,
propagandized, draped with the colours of
empire and the gloss of academic history. The Wars of living Memory were
written of that way but they were illustrated with photographs that
gave a glimpse of the true nature of war.

The first
time I saw colour photos from the Second World War I was shocked, these
were real people, they looked my age, they were not the Black and White
ghosts that I had seen for so many years. Along with the colour came
the realization that these great upheavals had been filled with REAL
people who smelled the earth, the smoke the blood and the death just as I
could.

Suddenly War changed from a historical event to a mass tragedy,
necessary sometimes but never something to take lightly. Suddenly to
stand with the dwindling numbers of veterans on November 11th became not
only a duty, but an honour. These men and women had seen unimaginable
horrors, they had lived through chaos and destruction and they were REAL
people. People I could shake the hands of, people I could see standing
with tears for their lost youth and their lost friends. The colour that
is in their memories we can never see, we only have the black and white
old photos.

There is now, no longer anyone alive
who knows the colours of WWI, who remembers the smell of the mud of
Flanders, the sound of artillery or the shrieks of dying companions.
That war has become history.

Soon the same will
happen for those who lived through WWII. And still, there are wars where
young men and women fight because they are told to. There are still men
and women now much younger than me who will have such memories.

To
stand beside them today is to stand beside all of those who are now
history, to stand and remember is to make sure that History is not
forgotten.